392 pp.; 234 x 156mm; paperback

ISBN 1903018 072; £20.00
 

 
 

CONTENTS
Preface
1	To Pick one Cook	13
Part One
WHAT DO COOKS DO?
2	Distributing Goodness	27
3	'A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook, and a Good Digestion'	44
4	'An Empire of Smoke'	67
5	What Do Cooks Do?	98
6	'On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces'	119
7	Slices of Life	141
8	Festivals, Beauty and Love	165
Part Two
SHARING AND CIVILISATION
9	'The Pudding That Took a Thousand People to Make'	191
10	Eve and Adam	216
11	The Settled Hearth	230
12	The Temple as Kitchen	244
13	Sovereign Consumers	268
14	The Sons of Mama Camous	299
15	Freedon from Cooks?	324
16	Angels Must Eat	352
	Acknowledgements	360
	Bibliography	361
	Index	379

The kitchen is the powerhouse of history. 

The hand that stirs the bowl makes the civilisation. 

Cooks have nothing to lose but their ignominy. 

There is immense power in the mundane, that which is too familiar almost to be noticed.

'Man is the Cooking Animal', said the biographer James Boswell. This sentiment is the foundation of a remarkable and innovative approach to human history by the Australian restaurateur and food critic, Michael Symons. 

People have tried to understand human development by charting the consequences of economics, political conflict and its resolution, intellectual creativity, or sexual and moral changes. Symons views the world via the stove-top and the cooking-pot. It puts a whole new angle on world history and, more important still, puts women at its centre. 

With delightfully speculative chapter-titles such as 'On the Physical and Political Consequences of Sauces' or 'A Good Bank Account, a Good Cook and a Good Digestion', Symons tries to see cooking as an existential act that takes in loving, sharing, distribution, and acquisition. 

He places cookery at the heart of civilisation: viewing, for example, ancient temples as sacred kitchens and interpreting the place of food and ritual dining in early political systems as well as in religions. 

The book is divided into two parts: the first a short history of cookery, the second an interpretation of the interface between cooking and life at large. 

Michael Symons used to run a significant restaurant in Adelaide. He also wrote a ground-breaking history of food and eating in Australia. Since then he has turned academic and explored the deeper meaning of cookery and society. 

This title is published by Prospect in the UK only.

WHAT'S COOKING?

Michael Symons

After publishing a gastronomic history of Australia One Continuous Picnic in 1982, and founding the Symposiums of Australian Gastronomy, Michael Symons completed a PhD in the sociology of cuisine and published The Shared Table on current issues. In his new book, A History of Cooks and Cooking, now published by Prospect Books in Great Britain and the University of Illinois in the United States (having been first issued in Australia as The Pudding that Took a Thousand Cooks), he examines the achievements of cooks since they 'first picked up stone kitchen knives'. This piece may be viewed as a publisher's puff or, more charitably, as a summary of his arguments.

People have cooked universally and for a long time. But why? 

What is the aim of cooking?

As if to contradict cooking's ubiquity, and the clamour of culinary publishing, its purpose has been oddly ignored. Authors often imply that it is obvious why people cook, but suggest widely different reasons. They range from a six-point list in a great edition of Mrs Beeton's to French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss' mystifying theories about 'the raw and the cooked'.

It's about time we knew why we cook. I run through a perhaps surprising variety of answers, before giving my preference.

Cooking is more than heating

In his invaluable On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee writes: 'Cooking can be defined in a general way as the transfer of energy from a heat source to food.' In this case, he restricts cooking to the application of heat. McGee is in distinguished company, including the major English dictionaries, which have, over the past century or so, converged upon to 'prepare (food) by heating it' (Concise Oxford Dictionary) and to 'prepare (food) by the action of heat, as by boiling, baking, roasting, etc' (Random House, Unabridged, 1981). Certainly, we use 'cook' to mean the use of browning reactions and so forth. However, we also have a sense of cooking involving many other operations - including purchasing, weighing, mixing, chopping, washing greens, following recipes and presenting food.

The use of fire has seemed pivotal, but this has slanted the way we think about cooking. The application of heat supports a view of cooks as chemists (or alchemists), who transform raw ingredients. Furthermore, the dictionary definition is merely descriptive. It looks narrowly at the immediate operations and consequences. It still leaves the question: Why do we cook? What are we 'gift-wrapping', to interpret Brillat-Savarin's depiction of frying in Meditation 7 of The Physiology of Taste?

Nutrition

The author of the gigantic New Edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management at the beginning of the twentieth century asserts:

More sophisticated nutritional explanations than Mrs Beeton's have to include ecological accounts. Rather than merely improving the individual's survival chances, cooking supports the success of the species. By increasing the range of potential foods, cooking contributes to human adaptability to various habitats. But there are many other ideas.

Hedonism

The sixth of Mrs Beeton's reasons hints at the extra aesthetic satisfaction of cooked food. Charles Lamb's delightful essay, 'A Dissertation on Roast Pig', pictures the ancients taking up cooking after discovering the pleasure of pork crackling. In his recipe book early in the nineteenth century, Dr William Kitchiner announces that the 'Òchef-d'oeuvreÓ of COOKERY, - is to entertain the Mouth without offending the stomach.'

Brillat-Savarin also argues that cooking multiplies pleasures. In the aphorisms at the beginning of The Physiology of Taste, he decides that in a metabolic universe the drive of appetite is rewarded by pleasure, and cookery refines this. In the first aphorism, he points to the significance of life in the world, 'and everything that lives, eats.' In the fifth, he says that the Creator forces us to eat, tempts us to do so with appetite and rewards us with pleasure. In the sixth, the good life is an 'act of intelligence, by which we choose things which have an agreeable taste rather than those which do not.' In the seventh, the pleasures of the table are universal, and can be surrounded by all others.

Later, he finds that man is, 'incontestably, among the sentient creatures who inhabit the globe, the one who endures most pain'. This misery and suffering make people throw themselves towards the opposite extreme, giving themselves 'completely to the small number of pleasures which Nature has permitted.' People enlarge pleasures, perfect them, complicate them and finally worship them (Meditation 14).

This reverses a very influential, antagonistic explanation of cooking. Cooking is wrong precisely because its purpose is to give pleasure. The warnings of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato against the deceits of cooks were echoed by medieval writers, and remain in the idea of chocolate cake being 'tempting'. Indeed, eating fat now beats sex as the leading commonplace sin. A venerable vegetarian argument follows the same direction - the only reason that people can stomach meat, the vegetarians contend, is that cooking disguises the nastiness of the raw state.

The hedonist argument has been backed by psychological explanations. In The Origin of Food Habits, H.D. Renner suggests that cooking would have been discovered accidentally, and that the unfamiliar taste of cooked food would initially have been repulsive. Instead, a mammal's first food, mother's milk, has always been warm, and so he speculates that people use fire primarily to imitate that comforting experience. 'In our civilised mode of living we continually take advantage of this reex action of warmth; every cup of tea is proof of it.'

Social expression

Within the social sciences, cooking is usually viewed as a social or cultural indicator. Serving caviare is an obvious example of food as social indicator. Rich and powerful people employ cooks to show off wealth and forbiddingly-refined sensibilities - in other words, to provide Thorstein Veblen's 'conspicuous consumption'. A more recent classic in this area, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, charts complex pressures for people to operate within fine distinctions.

This is another good suggestion, but again limited. It seems to work better as an explanation of luxurious cooking than of what might be termed 'inconspicuous consumption'. Rich people might wear their tables on their sleeves, so to speak, but would down-trodden peasants really cook gruel merely to 'express' their miserable state? We can read social position from a person or group's cooking, but it certainly does not suffice as cooking's purpose.

A sociological variant is that cooking actually reproduces social relationships. To give an example, Nickie Charles and Marion Kerr suggest that British wives are expected to cook 'proper meals' of meat and two veg (with more meat for the man). Through this, women are forced to perpetuate their subordinate position in the home.7

Cultural expression

An illustration of the associated view that cooking is a cultural indicator is that certain people cook frogs' legs to show that they are French people. Spaghetti-cooking reveals Italian-ness, and so on. Other people use their cooking (or at least food choice) to show their religious affiliations, a common example being that people eschew pork to demonstrate their Jewish or Islamic commitment.

Broadly, this is the approach of cultural studies. Introducing a lively survey of this rapidly multiplying research area, David Bell and Gill Valentine write: 'what we eat (and where, and why) signals, as the aphorism says, who we are.' An allied idea to cooking as a 'sign' is that 'meals are an important aspect of culture'. (This might seem to affirm the importance of cooking, but I prefer to argue the reverse, that culture is an important aspect of meals.)

In an extreme form, the cultural argument is found in so-called structuralist approaches, exemplified by the contributions of Claude LŽvi-Strauss and Mary Douglas during the 1960s and 1970s. For them, food is a 'language' which expresses deep-seated thought 'structures'. A classic instance is Douglas's observation that her own cooking follows the 'grammar' of one stressed element and two unstressed elements. Accordingly, a typical dish would be meat (the stressed element) and two veg. (the unstressed). A proper meal would be one main course accompanied by two minor. The daily pattern comprises one major meal and two lesser meals. This rhythm is intriguing, but many scholars find structuralism more mystifying than enlightening.

The American cookery writer Elisabeth Rozin and psychologist Paul Rozin show the way towards a more concrete version that might be labelled bio-structuralist. They wonder why different peoples use distinctive cooking-styles and their response, once more simplified for our purposes, goes like this: humans are omnivores, and in place of strong survival instincts, they have invented cultural ways to signal safe foods. When Hungarian cooking has evolved to use paprika, lard and onions, this is to tell other members of the culture that 'this is not poisonous'.

LŽvi-Strauss even suggests that the reason we cook is to signal that we are different from other animals. Given that humans are the comprehensively fire-exploiting animals, this idea has immediate appeal. Through this, he gave academic weight to the slogan 'the raw and the cooked', used generally to indicate that something belongs to culture rather than nature. Despite (or perhaps because of) structuralism's attention-getting rigidity, LŽvi-Strauss helped make food eventually a respectable field of intellectual inquiry. 

Civilizing process

Cooking is implicated in the increasing sophistication of manners. The implication is that cooking applies layers of politeness often to smother the naturalness of feeding. Among those observing this refining function, essayist Roland Barthes declares that the 'ornamentation' of Elle-magazine cookery - a smart, modern cookery 'based on coatings and alibis' - is 'for ever trying to extenuate and even to disguise the primary nature of foodstuffs, the brutality of meat or the abruptness of sea-food.'

Sociologist Norbert Elias also finds that cooking helps hide animality, and he explains the effect in terms of an overall 'civilizing process'. Elias does not mean that 'civilizing' is necessarily good, bad or even inevitable - just a trend. Putting it simply, he argues that, having to coexist in increasingly complex societies, people have to be more self-controlled. As an advocate of Elias's approach, sociologist Stephen Mennell ponders in All Manners of Food the development of refined food in England and France from the medieval period until the present. He suggests that increasing interdependence has been reflected in more equal distribution of foodstuffs, fewer extremes in cuisine and increased self-control of appetite, a 'civilizing of appetite' in the quantitative sense. This growth in 'moderation' cannot be separated from the development of the qualitative notion of 'good food', he writes.

The civilizing process is yet another important interpretation of cooking that could hardly be claimed to be complete. Also, changed behaviours might be described not so much as more civilized as more alienated, for which the next theory might prove more appropriate.

A step in production

Cooking plays a part in production, both as a step in the production of food itself and as a domestic support activity. Anthropologist Jack Goody discusses cooking as one of the steps in the entire 'process of providing and transforming food'. This preparation phase usually occurs in the domestic household, an 'arena usually allocated to women rather than men, and to servants rather than mistresses'.

Cooking as production links it to a considerable body of theory and analysis, namely Marxist. The 'analysis of cooking has to be related to the distribution of power and authority in the economic sphere, that is, to the system of class or stratification and to its political ramifications,' Goody writes. Indeed, historical materialism recognizes the organization of food as the 'first premise'. Nevertheless, in practice, this tradition has thrown more attention on the 'real' work of industrial workers and perhaps farmers, usually men, who are supported by women's domestic labour. Cooking has appeared as part of the 'reproduction' of the workforce, and so as ancillary. The recognition of such weaknesses renewed interest in accounts of cooking as consumption.

Consumption

Cooks are consumers - the purchasers, the recipients of marketing messages, and the 'gate-keepers' to the domestic domain. Their choices can be much more active than implied by production-oriented accounts. Consumers are not merely dictated to by producers, but offer resistance, indulge in individual expression, and, importantly, act on nutritional demands. It has to be added that appetite is a mighty stimulus to activity, especially to consumption in the eating sense, and so cooking.

And, after all these, I still have one strong explanation left: cooking can be viewed as intermediary to both production and consumption - as distribution.

Food distribution

Cooking distributes food. The sharing of food has often been viewed as why people come together for meals, lying behind such notions as 'breaking bread'.

In a seminal essay, 'The Sociology of the meal' (originally 1910), German sociologist Georg Simmel starts from what he calls 'material individualism'. As he puts it: 'what I think, I can let others know; what I see, I can let them see; what I say, hundreds can hear - but what the individual eats, no one else can eat under any circumstances.' Paradoxically, as he then points out, this selfishness is an unparalleled force to bring people together, putting meals at the centre of the social universe. Meals bring people together at definite times, introduce social divisions between those admitted and not admitted, and stimulate the intricacies of etiquette. Out of the brutality of eating unfolds the utmost cultural refinement and aesthetic expression.

A common problem with many discussions of distribution, including Simmel's, is that it happens almost as if by magic. Those kneeling at the altar rail partake of God's hospitality mysteriously. Those forging alliances sup together apparently unaided. We need to recognize that actual people provide the meals, and this is cooking.

The notion of cooking as sharing is not entirely new. The 'active sharing of food' lies at the root of what makes us different from animals, reports essayist Margaret Visser. Many animals might carry home food for their young, she writes, 'Only people actively, regularly, and continuously work on the portioning out of their food.' Philosopher Deane Curtin notes: 'The product of cooking É is best regarded as something to share.'

I have turned the idea into a book, A History of Cooks and Cooking, so that the cook's principal tool, rather than fire, is the dividing-up knife, and so on. Crucially, the distribution of food enables the distribution (or division) of labour, freeing people to take up specialized responsibilities within the overall food distribution task.

The depiction of cooking as sharing fits in with, or does not rule out, most of the processes introduced above. What cooking shares is nutrition. Cooking manipulates physical pleasures, so that distributive dishes are perceived as 'balanced'. Simmel's 'material individualism' unfolds - through sharing - into the utmost aesthetic refinements. As the pivot of production and consumption, cooking intersects with social class, politics, economics, cultural communication and so forth.

Cooking is the single earthenware pot at a glowing hearth, the elaborate handiwork of Antonin Car�me, and the simple-mindedness of Pizza Hut. Finding a common purpose for such diverse activities seems almost impossible, certainly as demonstrated by the multiplicity of existing explanations introduced above. Yet the complexities make it all the more worthwhile isolating a core cooking function from which others emerge. At its essence, cooking is the sharing of the food upon which rests our survival as individuals, societies and a species. In this way, cooks create civilization.

Fingers in many pies

Working out what cooks do is no trivial mission. Only once we've come up with a proposal can we truly begin to locate cooks in relation to other human activities. Only when we decide how to measure their achievements can we give cooks a place in history.

Even from this survey, cooking appears to serve an incredible variety of ends. It is everywhere, distracting us from the spiritual and the true, conspiring with the rich and pretentious, expressing religious mysteries, giving foods the stamp of human approval, making foods safer and easier to chew and digest, contributing to the nutritional flexibility of the species, chaining women to the kitchen sink, making hard lives more bearable, sustaining workers, adding to cultural sophistication. Cooks seem to have fingers in all pies.

The sheer multiplicity of simultaneous functions seems perplexing, and so I suggest that we have been getting it around the wrong way. One logical response is to accept that all other activities are explained by cooking. The helping trades - the farmers, the engineers, the bankers, and all the rest - have belittled the central cooks' role.

Cooks generally have been women, and their achievements rejected as inglorious and private. They have been restricted to the chopping board and spice rack. But while each of the cooks' actions might be infinitesimal, the results have multiplied.

Between us, we have eaten an enormous number of meals. We have nibbled, gorged and hungered our way through history. In my book, I show that cooks have been in charge - finding, sharing and giving food meaning. I argue that, at heart, cooks are sharers. In sharing food, they also share the tasks. In sustaining us physically, they also sustain us socially and culturally.

If we are what we eat, then cooks have not just made our meals, but also made us.

NOTES